The Power of Selfishness
by dang3rday5
Summary: The funny thing about pain is that it blinds you, makes you selfish. It turns your perspective inward. It's all about your pain, and your suffering. People do funny things when they're in pain. And children are known for doing very funny things. Never underestimate the power of selfishness. (First chapter rewritten from fanfic formally known as The Hidden.)
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

 _Summary: Uzumaki Namikaze Naruto comes to in a body that isn't his own, and a world he doesn't know._

 _This is a redone version of the first chapter of a new story called The Hidden. I feel like I didn't do it justice so I rewrote some parts. Hopefully it makes more sense now that last time._

* * *

Chapter 1

 ** _Disclaimer:_** I don't own Naruto, or anything outside my own body. I'm broke.

* * *

Fire. All he could remember when he first awoke was the fire searing his face; white-hot and merciless. He remembered screaming at the top of his lungs, unable to do anything else as he lay pinned under a collapsed burning support beam. It lay flat against the left side of his face, crushing his chest and arm.

He remembered pleading for his life at some point, for someone, anyone, to save him. He remembered swallowing fire for the first time, the way it burnt his mouth and throat and dug its cruel claws into his lungs, shredding them. He had prayed for death then, prayed for the fire to eat him whole, anything to stop the burning.

But the fire didn't eat him—it couldn't. Every time it ran its burning tongue along his skin, the burns would instantly heal. It could only suck at his skin with toothless lips, like a granny sucking at a Popsicle.

He wasn't sure how long he lay under the rubble, breathing in fire and screaming, but he did know that the smoke was almost as bad as the fire itself. In the blackened ruins of his old home, he had felt it snake down his throat and into his lungs, feeding him and choking him. Sometimes he dreamed about the smoke. He dreamed of the smoke as an old woman with grey skin, her thin arm pushing past his soft palate and down his throat. He dreamed of her long, crooked fingers wriggling into his lung. She would crone softly in his ear:

 _"_ _That's right, dearie. Take your medicine. It's good for you."_

The young blond threw himself out of bed, his mouth jammed open and his bulging from his sockets. He screamed but there was no sound. He winced at the sudden pain erupting inside his throat. It felt like he had swallowed a ball of razor wire. The familiar coppery tang of blood coated the back of his mouth.

He was in a bedroom, a child's bedroom judging from the size of the bed. And if it was a child's bedroom, then it was the weirdest one he had ever seen. The walls were covered with sheets of paper riddled with notes. They were plastered to the wall from the floor to the ceiling. A lot of them were old and mustard-yellow. The room stank of dust and old, stale paper.

He swung his legs out of bed and pushed off. Only he must have misjudged how far away the ground was because his legs crumpled beneath him as he hit the ground, and he landed flat on his face. The blond groaned into the tiles, then extracted his face from the floor. Something was wrong with his legs. He turned onto his back and gazed down at them. Instead of two long and well-muscled legs, they were tiny and spotless; a child's legs.

His alarm was only silenced by the fact that he had no voice. He took several small breaths interspersed long exhales, purposefully slowing his heartbeat to stop from panicking. His _legs_ felt like sacks filled with beads and tingled excruciatingly. The blond cursed under his breath and then began the morbid and embarrassing crawl back towards his bed. When he had finished he took stock of himself. His upper body starting from his waist was wrapped in gauze that stank of aloe. Burn salves?

Despite the possible burns, the most worrying problem was that all he could see was a child's body. If he were any younger he would have been doing his best impression of a headless chicken, but years of war had steeled his will and sharpened his intellect. Instead he began to collect and compile as much information as he could gather.

He was somehow a child again, albeit one with what seemed like massive burns across his body. He was in a child's room, surrounded by hundreds of notes, some so old that he was sure they would disintegrate if he touched them. He also had someone else's memories. He almost dismissed his first assumption as impossible, then he remembered Raiya's words on the impossible:

 _"_ _Remember kid, once you have eliminated all the possible solutions, then whatever is left, no matter how impossible or improbable, is the truth."_

There was only the impossible left. He had somehow ended up in the past; or in some alternate reality; or this was some sort of illusion. But that was unlikely; a Genjutsu powerful enough to fool all of his senses simultaneously would require a constant supply of chakra being introduced into his system, something he would have noticed if it were happening.

So, he was either in the past or in another reality. You would think that he would be panicking or in denial, but ever since he had mastered the Hiraishin, his understanding of reality and its laws had become much more flexible. His father's technique was beyond jutsu. In fact, it was beyond all known laws of reality. The Hiraishin actually bent the laws of space and time, creating a miniature wormhole in the fabric of reality, allowing someone to move from one point in space to another instantaneously.

He sometimes felt like his father had left the jutsu to him as a sort of lesson. You couldn't master the Hiraishin without feeling the walls of your understanding being pulled down around you. Sometimes he felt like it had been his father's way of showing him that anything was possible. He wouldn't be surprised if that had been part of its original purpose.

Still, if he was somewhere in the past, then the real question was how did he get there? The last thing he remembered, of those memories that were truly his, was dying. He had been lying in the midst of a burning battlefield, all of his chakra completely gone, his body shutting down. It hadn't been especially painful but he supposed it was because he was too far gone to care at that point. He had just defeated the so called Goddess of Chakra, the woman who had taken a bite of the forbidden fruit of the gods and gained their power. Truth be told, defeating her had been easier than he thought it would be. She had been arrogant, believing she could defeat anyone because she was the progenitor of ninjutsu. But that had only meant she was not familiar with his true heritage, the greatest shinobi art: Fuuinjutsu.

He remembered the look on the all-mighty goddess's face as her power was locked away, taken back by the shinigami himself. She had lived past the extraction of her chakra, but it had left her a mortal woman. He had enjoyed jacking her in the jaw before he died. The look of shock and terrible realization on her face as she picked a tooth from her broken gum had been priceless. (The blond boy smiled at that particular memory. He loved taking people down a peg.)

He had been dying. His senses were leaving him. It was true death, like the smoke, slow and silent. Then there had been a sucking noise, as if his body was depressurizing, his consciousness being sucked out of its mortal shell. He had been sure it was death. Then he had awoken in a body that was not his.

The blond boy closed his eyes and began to feel for his chakra. He had no idea how old this body was, but he wanted to make sure that he could at least still do that. It came to him as easily and quietly as water flowing down a hill. He felt its warmth course through his tingling limbs, soothing him. The blond boy frowned. This was _his_ chakra. The chakra he had before he ended up in this body. The chakra he had trained and refined his control over since he had been born. That wasn't supposed to be possible; chakra was native to your body. It was produced from a person's chakra core, as personal as a fingerprint. How had his chakra come with him?

Then he remembered when Hinata had died.

* * *

Pain— _Nagato_ had killed her. The blond boy had been immobile, pinned to the ground by chakra disrupting rods through his hands and feet. She had appeared in front of him with her hands covered in blue fire and charged the self-proclaimed god with the greatest technique of her family, but it had been no use. Nagato had used his ability to repel matter to deflect all her attacks. As soon as Hinata came within range she was instantly blasted to the ground. It would have been fine if she had just stayed down, but Hinata had inherited his stubbornness. No matter how many times she was rebuffed she would get up again…and again…and again. He could still picture the way her body twisted limply in the air as she flew, as if she were filled with stuffing instead of flesh and bone. He could still hear her bones breaking upon the rocks and her muscles tearing under the strain. Both her arms had hung limp for her shoulders by the time Pain decided to end it.

He had begged her to stop, to just lie down, to just give up. She had just smiled, blood running down the crack of her mouth, and told him that she loved him. Pain had killed her with rod through the heart, quick and painless. She had slumped to the ground without a struggle. He remembered how she had looked at him, and the slowing thrum of her pierced heart. Then it had gone silent.

Sasuke had once told him that he wouldn't understand his loss until he had watched someone he loved being killed. The blond boy had scoffed at his words then. Hinata had been his epiphany. He had no idea what it meant to watch, to be completely helpless when someone needs you. Now he knew.

He remembered waking up underwater. He didn't bother holding his breath; he knew it wasn't real water, only despair. He thought about not standing up. He could just relax and float. That's what the dead do, isn't it? When they're in the water—they all float.

It was the thought of Pain's face that brought him to his feet. He hadn't even looked at her when he had killed her. It was like he had swatted a fly. Pain had killed the first person who had ever told him that she loved him, and it hadn't even been worth the effort to look at her. The thought that her death had been meaningless turned something black inside him. That had been the first time he had ever wanted to hurt someone.

He rose as if he were falling in reverse and broke the surface of the water without a sound. He was in what looked like a sewer. The walls were black with age and coated green with mold and scum, and water dripped from somewhere above. There were pipes built into the walls, each glowing blue as they pumped his chakra through his body. It was his room of his mind.

There was a huge gate in front of him. It was black and lined with bars that were almost as wide as he was. On the front of the gate, where the two sides met, was a large piece of paper with a seal on it. The seal looked like a six-year-olds drawing of the sun.

Two red eyes opened from behind the gates. They were both the size of manhole covers and _glowed_ in the dark.

The thing behind the gates spoke, and the whole sewer trembled under its voice.

"So, you finally decided to visit? And during a flood no less."

The blond boy stared right into the thing's eyes. 'Shut up.'

A wave of crimson fire spewed out from the cage, turning the knee-high water into steam as it passed. The boy had merely held up his hand and the fire stopped in its tracks. He held it there for a second then closed his fist. The fire shrunk into a tiny ball of flame in his palm, and vanished without another sound. The sewer was now fogged with steam and a fine hissing noise like a tire deflating. He could barely see the cage anymore.

"I've been thinking about what you said. And you're right, I am too weak to defeat my enemies," he said, almost hearing the thing behind the gates smiling.

"But so are you."

Another wave of crimson fire came rushing towards him. He dismissed it without even blinking.

"Who do you think you're talking to, human!?" the thing behind the gates roared, shaking the entire sewer. "I am the Kyuubi-no-Kitsune! I am the most powerful entity that walks this earth!"

"Yeah, and all it takes is a pair of red and black eyes to turn you into a little puppy." He said.

The Kyuubi. How did the Human know his weakness?

"You forget this is MY mind. I see everything that happens here."

The Kyuubi was an all-powerful entity, capable of causing natural disasters with a flick of its tails, but it knew when to listen.

"I'm about to die.' The blond boy said without a hint of emotion. 'I can't beat this guy, and I won't let you take over, you would just destroy everything in your path."

"So you would rather die than release me?' The Kyuubi said. 'And you wonder why I despise humans."

"No. I would release you if I could trust you. But I can't. You tried to take my body once before."

The Kyuubi thrust the broad side of its body into the gates, shaking the whole room. "What would you do, Human?! What would you do if you were locked in the dark and forced to spend your life a prisoner in someone's mind because of human greed!? Wouldn't you try to escape? Wouldn't you give anything to be free from this fucking cage!?" The Kyuubi bellowed, thrashing its tails and howling at him.

The boy winced. It was true. Being locked in a cage for all of his life didn't sound fun. Anyone would try to escape.

He sighed. "You're right."

This stopped the Kyuubi's rant.

"What did you say?"

"I said you are right. Anyone would try to escape."

"And yet you would rather die than grant me my freedom?"

"No. I would rather die than let you destroy my home." The boy said. "But that wasn't the point of this conversation. I'm gonna die."

"So let me out! I could easily destroy this mortal who claims to be a god!"

"That's not going to happen though. Because I know after you're finished with him then you'll turn right around and start stomping on my village."

The great red eyes thinned. 'You think so little of me.' It was a statement rather than a question.

"You haven't given me any reason to trust you," the boy said.

The great fox got ready to respond then stopped. The boy was right. Neither of them had given the other a chance.

"So what will happen to us now?"

The boy looked inquisitively at the Kyuubi, still hidden behind the darkness of the cage and the dissipating steam, then smiled.

'There's only one way we'll be able to live together.'

The Kyuubi caught on before he could answer.

'Trust.'

* * *

Trust had been the thread that pulled them together. That first time had been like the first time he had sex (with whom he didn't say, not even to the Kyuubi). It had been exhilarating and frightening and somewhat awkward; they had to learn to share control of a single body, their consciousnesses fused together to form one entity. It had been difficult; they had to learn how to complement one another instead of trying to take control. They had almost died a number of times during that fight, but they had managed to come out on top without too much damage dealt to the surrounding area.

When it was done, and they discovered that the six they had thought were just puppets held together with chakra strings, they endeavored to confront the real Pain, who was hiding in a cave some miles away.

Pain was a disappointment. They had expected some sort of immortal being sitting on a throne made of human bone or something along that line. Instead they had beheld a shriveled root of a man with red hair and purple discs for eyes. His body was thin to the point that it was almost impossible to look at him without feeling guilty. He looked like the corpse of child that had starved to death. There was a bunch of black rods sticking out of his back.

There was a woman beside him. She had blue hair and yellow eyes. She was the one who used paper as her weapon.

Pain greeted the blond boy with a chakra rod through the stomach. The blond boy casually pulled the offending weapon from his guts and let it clank onto the floor.

Then Pain began to speak. His voice was ravaged, like he had spent most of his life screaming at the top of his lungs.

"So, now that you have experienced true pain, what is your answer?"

The blond boy, his pupil's split in two intersecting bars—one feral slit over a large horizontal bar of a frog's eye—forming the shape of a cross, resisted his other half's cries that told him to kill this piece of shit.

"I don't know the question. Kinda hard to answer a question without knowing what it is."

Pain took a moment to look at him. "You were Jiraiya's student once; he must have asked you the question. When he told you what it meant to be a shinobi."

Naruto remembered.

* * *

It had been just before they returned to Konoha at Tsunade's request. They had stopped at an inn on the way, mostly because Raiya needed a drink before the ribbing Tsunade was about to give him for not responding to her messages. The sky had been steel grey and lined with white clouds, the first sign of rain in almost a year.

The two sat side-by-side at the bar, sipping some sake. Raiya had introduced him to all the vices of the shinobi lifestyle except for whoring. Tsunade would break his back if she ever heard that he had taken her darling surrogate son to a whorehouse.

They had been sipping sake from their cups when Raiya had suddenly stopped drinking. He had turned to the blond boy and said his name. That caught the blond's attention. Raiya never called him by his name; he had always been "brat". He had once asked the older man when he would stop calling him a brat. Raiya had just smiled and said:

"Never."

The blond boy turned to him, the drinking cup and raised halfway to his face.

"What?" he asked.

"It's time for your final lesson, brat. It's something none of my previous students could answer, not even the Fourth." Raiya said, setting down his cup. The blond boy mirrored him. Raiya knew that would get its attention.

"By now you must know what it means to be a shinobi. And not that protecting-the-village or fighting-to-prove-the-glory-of-your-village bullshit they teach in the academy." Raiya smiled in a way that was almost painful to watch. "You know what I said when you made your first kill?"

* * *

The blond boy did remember. He had been facing a missing-nin, and that bastard had taken a small boy as a hostage. He had threatened to kill the boy if he didn't surrender. The blond boy had taken one look at the small boy's face and lowered his weapons. Then he quickly threw a kunai at the man's face. The kunai whistled through the air before it pierced his left eye.

He hadn't died immediately though. At first he just let the boy go. Then he had tried to pull the kunai from his eye. He had reached with both hands twitching violently as if he were a marionette controlled by a monkey. When that failed, he tried levering it out of his skull by weighing down on it with his arms. By then his knees were jerking with the force of it. He had collapsed like a puppet when its strings are cut.

That would have been fine, but then the really nightmare inducing thing happened. He did a dance as he died. His body jiggled and wiggled and jived on the floor, the backs of his feet batting against the ground and his head thumping up and down; he looked like a corpse with an electrical current running through it. Then his body went still—thankfully still—and didn't move again.

The blond boy hadn't been able to sleep for a week after that. His nights were spent laying completely still, trying not to twitch. It had gotten so bad that Raiya had banned him from training because he kept passing out. His sensei then said something that spelled it out for him, what it meant to be a shinobi, without any of the bullshit attached.

"Shinobi kill, brat. It's been that way since there was even a word for it. A shinobi kills, or is killed. There is no way around it. You say you want to be a shinobi, you want to the Hokage, well that means you need to kill."

Raiya had taken one look at stricken boy then sighed.

"And there's no excuse. No way you can take it back. You murdered that man. You did it because if you didn't then that boy would be dead right now. But that doesn't take away from the fact that you murdered him; you stole his life and killed any future he had. And you have to live with that."

He waited until he couldn't bare the look on the blond boy's face anymore.

"I'm sorry kid. We suckered you into this life. Us. Me, Tsunade, your teachers in the academy, Kakashi, even Sasuke, I think. We lied to you and fed you tales of heroism and bravery and all that bullshit. We did it because we needed you. We needed you to be strong."

Raiya pulled the blond boy into his arms.

"I'm sorry kid."

The blond boy didn't know whether to feel angry or betrayed or sad. So he just screamed instead. Screamed, and cried.

* * *

The blond boy nodded. "Yeah, I remember."

Raiya took a moment to look at the blond boy. He had grown well over the past three years. He had grown _tall_ , almost tall enough for the top of his head to reach Raiya's chin. He hadn't bothered to cut his blond hair since they started, so now it hung loose and draped over his shoulders. He had taken to combing it daily, so it looked very smooth and glossy. His face was so much like his father's that it sometimes hurt to look at him. He hadn't grown any stubble; his father hadn't been able to grow any facial hair either. It was his eyes though, that got Raiya the most. They may have been the wrong color but they are his mother's eyes. And they had all loved his mother, maybe even more so than his father. And maybe that was why they loved the blond boy the most.

Raiya took another shot of sake as if it would make him brave.

"Shinobi kill. And death breeds pain. Pain breeds anger. Anger breeds Hatred. Hatred breeds death. So you could say that Shinobi are the main cause in a cycle of pain and anger and hatred and death that always ends in bloody war."

"You can't mean that—"

"It's exactly like that!" Raiya spat. "Now let me finish."

"If Shinobi are part of a long chain of hatred that ends in inevitable war, then what will you, a shinobi, do about it?"

The blond boy took a moment to look at his sensei. Raiya's brow was furrowed together. His eyes were filled with dreadfully hopeful light. The blond boy had a feeling that this was the culmination of his training with the old man. For whatever reason Raiya had decided to train him, his answer would determine whether or not the old man had been wasting his time.

"I don't know." He said truthfully. He said it because he felt that any other answer he could think, any of the introspective speeches or declarations of "breaking the cycle", would have been lies. They would have tasted foul as he said them.

Raiya had scrutinized him for a moment then smiled brilliantly, as if he were a man who had just proposed to by the love of his life.

"That may be the best answer I've ever heard," Raiya said.

The blond boy had smiled back just as brilliantly.

They both drank more sake, and said nothing else.

* * *

"How will you break the cycle of pain?" Pain asked.

The blond boy, now much older than when Raiya had asked him this question, felt his new partner go quiet; even he knew the significance of the question. He took several calming breaths as memories of Hinata's death erupted from the back of his mind; each one punctuated by the sound of Pain's voice.

"Honestly, I don't care. All I can think about is how much I want to kill you," he growled.

Pain sighed. "It is as I suspected. All succumb to pa—"

"I wasn't done speaking yet!" The blond boy snapped.

The self-proclaimed god stopped talking, but the boy could see from the slight widening of his eyes that he had been startled. He smirked.

"Raiya told me about you. Said that there were three orphans when they were first named the Sannin. I'm assuming one of the corpses was the third member of your party."

The woman with the blue hair stepped towards him but Pain raised a hand and she stopped moving. The look in her eye told the blond boy that she would very much like to shut him up. Pain signaled him to continue.

"I can imagine your story; I've heard it so many times that it's hard to feel sympathy for you. Everybody has their reasons, their justifications for what they do. That's the thing about pain. It makes people selfish. If you experience it for long enough then you lose the perspective. Your sense of the world shrinks to tunnel vision. It's all about your pain, your suffering. Nothing else and no one else matters. Kind of like you."

This time the blue-haired woman did attack him. Before Pain could stop her, the blond boy had her pinned against the cave wall with one hand around her throat. Red miasma had formed around his hand and it ate at her throat. Smoke hissed under his grip. The woman abandoned her attack and began clawing at his hand. She screamed but it came out as a thin wheeze of air with no actual strength.

"Let her go!" Pain yelled. The blond boy enjoyed the way Pain's voice cracked at the end of his sentence. His voice sounded like dry leaves being crushed under a heavy boot.

The blond boy watched the blue-haired woman writhe under his grip the way he might examine a fly writhe on the floor after ripping its wings off. The woman's face was turning reddish-purple now and tears streamed down the sides of her gaping mouth, her tongue flailing in the dark tunnel of her throat. She wheezed again in a long hard breath, a failure of a scream.

"LET HER GO NOW!" Pain screamed, thrashing in his place. The blond boy watched him. The Kyuubi snickered.

"It seems like even gods can bleed," he said.

"You remember that girl you killed?" the boy said to the god. Then he twisted his hand. The blue-haired woman's neck snapped with a sound like a twig being stepped on.

The blond boy watched as the man named God screamed. He screamed as loud as his tortured voice could hold on. His arms reached out to grab a hold of her, to cradle her, but he couldn't; he couldn't move. He suddenly seemed like how he looked, a broken old man with no way to do anything for himself.

The blond boy smiled cruelly. He had just gotten a wonderful, horrible idea.

"Now you know true pain."

Pain's eyes darted to the blond boy, and something seemed to light up behind his eyes. They were purple moons in the dark.

The blond boy stopped smiling. "You know what you're feeling right now? That's called perspective."

Pain looked at him the way Sasuke had looked at him that night they had fought. They both had murder in their eyes.

"I will kill you," he said flatly.

The blond boy tilted his head. He smiled thinly.

"Don't be so dramatic."

Then, before the man named God could react, the blond boy buried his thumbs in the man's eyes.

* * *

Pain screamed, his eyes turned to blazing coals and leaking boiling tears down his face. He only stopped when two hands grabbed his shoulders and shook him. When he opened the lids of his eyes the pain fell away like the dregs of a bad dream. He realized that he was on his back, staring at the black ceiling of the cave. Konan was shaking him awake. Had he fallen asleep?

The blond boy answered his question.

"So now that you've been reminded of what true pain is, how do you feel?"

Pain sat up abruptly and glared at the blond boy.

"You dare?!"

"I do," the boy said, "now to answer your question: I don't know."

Pain stumbled over his anger. He had not been expecting that. An insipid speech about breaking the cycle, or maybe something their sensei had told him, but not a simple 'I don't know'.

"What?" Pain asked, because he didn't have anything else to say.

"I don't know. I don't know how to break the cycle; I don't know how to make people let go of their hate; I don't know how to take away their pain. I just don't know."

Pain digested his answer in silence. When he was finished he began to laugh. At first it was loud and boisterous but grew feeble near the end, like an emergency siren's howl.

"It seems that Jiraiya has failed then.

"How so?"

"Our sensei was searching for what he called the child of destiny, someone who would end the cycle. He once believed that it was I who would do it, and I've obviously failed that title. He believed that the Fourth would do it, but he died. And then he found you. When I heard that he had another apprentice I thought that maybe he had finally found the one he had been looking for. But it seems he was wrong."

The blond boy frowned. "I don't know about finding the child of destiny, but I don't think he failed."

"And how do you assume that?" Pain asked.

"I don't think this child of destiny is a person. I don't think there could be anyone who could fit that role. It's just too big." He rolled a hand through his blond hair, trying to collect his thoughts. "I mean, you have the sage's eyes but you don't have his will."

The blue haired woman named Konan wanted to protest but Pain placed a hand on her shoulder, silencing her.

"And the Fourth had the will, but he was weak. He didn't have the strength to change the world."

"And you?" Pain asked.

"I don't know about me. I've never been a genius, I don't have a bloodline, and I don't know if I can leave this cave without killing you."

This time, Konan situated herself in front of Pain.

"But," here the red chakra flared again, coating the blond boy's body with red light, "I do have something neither of you did."

Pain stood up, taking a hold of Konan's shoulder for support. "And what is that?"

The blond boy looked at his hand. "I'm not alone."

"Maybe this child of prophecy isn't a single person but a group of people, each with their own parts to play. Maybe we were meant to meet. Maybe we were meant to have this conversation. And if that's true, then maybe all this was meant to show you something."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," the blond boy said, picking up the discarded chakra rod at his feet, "maybe I was meant to show you something. Something you taught me." Then he stabbed himself in the leg with it.

Pain prepared for another assault upon his mind but had no way of defending himself as the floor beneath him gave way. He fell for a few moments before landing in a pool of water. He resurfaced a second later, whirling around, his red hair whipping around his skull. His adversary was in the distance. The blond boy was standing in front of a gigantic cage. Behind the bars of the gates were two glowing red eyes. Pain knew it was the Kyuubi, could feel its power even in this illusion. He knew that this was one of the blond boy's memories. What he couldn't understand was why the blond had decided to show him this.

The blond boy then did something amazing. He stepped inside the cage. Pain almost warned the boy before he remembered that this had already happened.

"Why did you show me this?" Pain asked, posing his question to the open air.

The boy appeared behind him. "I wanted to show you my answer. This was the first moment I tried to actually talk to the Kyuubi without demanding something of him. This was the moment we decided to trust one another."

Pain looked at him quizzically.

"I mean maybe that's all we need. Maybe we just need to trust one another. And trust only comes when we learn to share our pain instead of holding on to it."

"So you plan on sharing your pain with me?" Pain asked.

The blond boy smiled bitterly. "I don't need to. You were there."

Pain remembered the girl he had killed, and then remembered the way he had felt when the blond had showed him Konan's death. He winced.

"So I assume it is my turn."

"Only if you want to."

* * *

The two looked at one another and felt the world slip out from underneath their feet, rushing past them with a sound like a train bellowing through a tunnel. When the world finally slowed down, it was raining. They were standing in a valley. In the distance were Pain and the orange haired man who would become Pain's first puppet. Above them, peering over the edge of one of the sides of the vallry, was the man who had defeated the Sannin, Hanzo the Salamander. He had Konan on her knees and had a kunai pressed against her throat.

"This was the moment I became Pain." Pain said. The boy could hear the slightest hitch in his throat.

Hanzo demanded that Pain kill the orange-haired man. He said he would kill Konan if he didn't. Pain hesitated and looked at the kunai in his hand. While he did that the orange-haired boy rammed himself onto the exposed blade.

The blond boy winced as the younger Pain screamed in grief and desolation.

The vision cut to black.

* * *

Both men awoke simultaneously. Konan's eyes darted between them. They both looked tired, as if they had gone through some great tragedy together.

"So what now?" Pain asked.

"Now comes the hard part." The blond boy said.

Konan moved to confront the boy but stopped when he turned around.

"You said that Raiya had failed. I said you were wrong. You're wrong because I choose to believe in what he believed. I choose to trust in him, the way he trusted in me, and in you." Pain looked at him. "I choose to not give in to my pain."

As he walked away, he said something that made the God weep: "I forgive you."

* * *

Two things happened that day that would forever confirm that he had made the right decision:

All the people who died or had been killed by Pain's attack were miraculously revived; and the blond boy never saw either of Jiraiya's students ever again.

Pain had manipulated his puppets with chakra. And maybe that was the key. Maybe chakra wasn't just made from the body. The more he learned, the more it seemed to be that chakra, at least in part, came from someone's very soul. And if his chakra was here, and if it came from his sould, then this wasn't a dream, or a genjutsu or even reincarnation.

This was real.

* * *

 _You'll notice, if you read my other work, that I had to take a completely different approach with this one. I'm trying to practice my novel writing, so if it reads like a novel then I've accomplished my goal. Also, please leave me a comment, I want to do better and you can help me by telling me how good (or bad) I'm doing._

 _Until later!_


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 – Family

* * *

 _Author's note: I do not own Naruto or anything outside my own body. I'm broke._

* * *

The blond boy, unsure of whether his name was still Naruto, stood from his bed and took small shuffling steps towards the adjoining bathroom, careful not to disturb the papers still littering his bedroom floor. He had to find out what he looked like.

The adjoining bathroom was about half the size of his room. There was a toilet, and a shower, and a basin to wash his face in. There was a small mirror above the basin that hung low enough for him to see himself in. Tube bulbs glared light down from the ceiling.

Naruto saw a mummy. Almost everything above his waist was covered in grey gauze. His face was masked with rolls of bandage that left only his mouth and eyes visible. His nose was smashed against his face with two small holes poked under his nostrils. He couldn't tell much from what the bandages left exposed but he could feel that at least part of his upper lip on the left side was gone. He supposed eating things like soup would be difficult, and more than a little grotesque to watch.

 _"Okay,"_ he thought _. "You could just leave it like this. You don't need to look any further than this. The bandages are there for a reason."_

"Coward," he told himself. He hadn't been vain in his previous life, but he hadn't exactly been bad-looking either. He had a few wonderful encounters with the opposite sex thanks to his sun-kissed skin and golden hair. To suddenly be disfigured was disconcerting, and he couldn't help the little part of him that was apprehensive about his current appearance.

But he had gotten to know a lot of old war veterans, men and women, and their scars had never seemed to bother their spouses. He had earned more than a few scars of his own back then, including a large hole situated where his heart was—a token from Sasuke.

However, giving into his apprehension and fear had never been his style. Naruto raised his hands and felt blindly around the back of his head. He had suffered enough head trauma to know that the knot holding his mask together was tied around the back of his head; nurses and doctors left the knots there to discourage their patients from undoing their own bandages. He only had to search for a moment before he found it.

What he saw underneath took his breath away.

One of the veterans Naruto had met during the last ten years of his life had described it best. She was an old woman who had survived 6 months of torture and interrogation under some of the worst conditions imaginable. She had the unlucky pleasure of being captured during war time.

* * *

The night they met had been slowly sneaking up on Naruto after one of the worst missions of his life.

While the village was still busy picking its teeth from the floor after Pain's attack, there had been resurgence in bandit activity across the Fire Country.

Bandit attacks tripled during the next three months, and Tsunade grew more pale and weary with each report of more burned villages and dead farmers. The remaining peasants all began making pilgrimages to Konoha. Hundreds, nearly thousands, of farmers and blacksmiths and milkmaids and tanners and their families and close friends made their way to the hidden village seeking protection. It got so bad that they started to form communities outside the city walls. Hordes of children held out cupped hands as people streamed through the gates in waves of a hundred or more at a time.

Eventually Konoha was bursting at the seams. Tsunade ordered that all these people be fed and cared for, but even then she knew that wouldn't solve the issue. They needed to get rid of the bandits, and the only way that would happen was if Konoha shinobi reminded them where they belonged on the food chain.

But she couldn't send out hundreds of loyal ninja and hope nothing happened while they were gone. Konoha had enemies that would gladly pick at its corpse if they thought they could get away with it. Instead she sent for Naruto. He had been crowned Konoha's protector and with him at the forefront the people would feel safe. _Safe enough to go home_ , she told him.

He had been sent out with Kakashi and a handful of Konoha-nin—Hinata, Rock-lee, and Ten-ten among them. The others he had never met, but the way they looked at him told him all he needed to know. He wouldn't be able to trust them.

They spent the next week hunting around Fire Country. They found small pockets of bandits, thirty or forty at a time. These were dealt with easily, and not more than an hour after the Konoha-nin would be on their way again. After four days of hunting Naruto had an ugly thought: T _his couldn't be all of them. They were hiding._

On the fifth day they found something that was supposed to be impossible.

* * *

It was a village that seemed completely fine. There were men and women roaming and chatting happily, children playing in the dirt, old people sitting outside. Hinata counted at least a hundred people living there.

Naruto had been sent in alone. He went to the local tavern and had a conversation with the bartender. Raiya had told him that if you wanted to know anything about anywhere, you went to where people drank. Lips tended to loosen when alcohol was involved.

It turned out that there had been no bandit attacks, nor any mention of any bandits at all. The bartender said it was just dumb luck. And Naruto would have been inclined to believe him, but he wasn't thirteen anymore.

Naruto's childhood had been a hostile environment. From a young age he had to know when he wasn't welcome (always), when it was time to walk away, and when it was time to run. As he was drinking his sake, he could tell that the bartender would like nothing better than to reach over the bar top and strangle him. And from the way the way the tavern had gone quiet when he entered, he guessed that that particular sentiment was shared by the rest of the tavern.

He finished his drink quickly and left.

On his way out of the village, Naruto found the place where the children played. He immediately sensed that something was wrong. The children were playing tag, and hide-n-seek, but there weren't any smiles or laughter. Their eyes were wide open, their faces pale, their hands trembling.

A girl that looked five years old tripped and skinned her knee. Naruto tried to help her. When the children saw the strange man with the blond hair coming they stampeded. Suddenly all thirty or so of the kids were running away from him, some screaming, others simply blazing hot trails in the dirt. The little girl tried to ignore her knee and get away but tripped. Naruto caught her by her waist and hoisted her up. The little girl squirmed in his grasp the way a gerbil might squirm in your hands. It would have been cute if she didn't sound like she was about to cry.

She was wearing a long summer dress made of brown cloth. It ran down to her shoeless feet. As she struggled in his grasp, the back of the dress pulled down enough for him to notice the seal on the back of her neck. Naruto felt his limbs suddenly lose their strength. The little girl capitalized on his moment of weakness and escaped. The back of her dress bobbed up and down as she hobbled away, making the seal play peek-a-boo with her every step.

* * *

Naruto returned to his team with his face the color of a paper plate. When Hinata asked him what was wrong, he replied:

"We can't go back there."

One of the Konoha-nin he didn't know snickered. "What? Is the Hero of Konoha scared?"

Kakashi flashed the Konoha-nin a look that shut him up. "What do you mean? Are these the bandits we've been looking for?"

Naruto accepted a bottle of water and swallowed three mouthfuls before he felt that horrible click at the back of his throat disappear.

"Yeah. They're the ones we're looking for. But they have us beaten.."

"What do you mean?"

Here Naruto seemed to get angry. But that was okay. Kakashi could handle angry Naruto.

"All the men are the bandits we're looking for. I'm guessing they killed all the husbands and decided to lay low. They kept the women and children alive to keep the ruse, but I have no doubt that they'll use them as hostages to get away."

"So what's the problem? All we have to do is kill them before they get close enough to kill the hostages." One of the other nin nodded.

"If you would shut up and let me finish then you might hear why." Naruto spat in their direction, making them flinch.

"Easy, Naruto." Kakashi said.

"You wouldn't be telling me that if you knew what I knew, Kakashi!"

This time Kakashi flinched. Naruto never used that tone with him. In fact, he couldn't remember when he had _ever_ used that tone before.

Hinata came to the rescue. She put both hands on his face and made him look her at her.

"Calm down, Naruto. Tell me what's wrong."

Naruto struggled for a minute then relaxed. The rest of the Konoha-nin recognized the strange, calming effect the Hyuuga had on the Jinchuriki.

This sudden change in their dynamic had come when they had reunited after Pain's attack. The whole village had crowded to thank Naruto and proclaim him a hero, but the first thing he did was find Hinata and hold her. Ten-ten remembered that embrace. It wasn't the kind a boy gives a girl; it was one meant for lovers who have been away from one another for far too long.

The blond took several calming breaths then folded the Hyuga's hands into his. "I'm okay."

Hinata held his gaze for another moments then stepped aside, one hand continuing to hold his.

"They have hostages, yes. But not in the way you think." Naruto said. Kakashi noted the way his thumb circled the back of Hinata's hand. It reminded him of an infant clutching at a teddy bear for support. It frightened him.

"All the villagers, the women and children, have suicide seals on their necks."

This time it was Kakashi's turn to go pale.

"What is a suicide seal, Ten-ten?" Rock-Lee asked, noting the way his teammate's eyes bulged in their sockets.

"Th-they are a special type of seal, normally only reserved for ANBU sent on S-rank missions." Ten-ten said. Her voice sounded like a pile of shaking leaves.

"They are reserved for those missions with a less than 3% chance of survivability," Kakashi went on, most of his shock hidden behind his mask. "They're meant to keep information from the enemy. We use them when the threat of being captured is too high."

"But what do they do?" One of the Konoha-nin, a woman, asked.

Naruto answered her question. "They force the chakra within someone's pathways to reverse its course, flowing into the chakra core instead of out of it. This creates a sort of buildup that can't be released via normal means."

"The short answer is that they make people's pathway explode." Kakashi finished dryly.

"But won't it take a long time for the chakra to build up enough to be lethal to the villagers?" The female Konoha-nin ased. "Since they haven't trained their chakra?"

"No. In fact it will be quicker. Their pathways are thinner, easier to block up. It wouldn't be more than a few seconds before the light show. And what a show it will be." Kakashi continued. "You may think that the explosion will be small, but it won't. Imagine a fire cracker. If you light it in your hand and hold it then it'll burn your hand. But you take that same firecracker and close your fist around it…you may as well begin learning how to eat with your other hand."

"So what are we supposed to do? We can't just leave them there! They're criminals! This is our mission!" The Konoha-nin who had snickered earlier said. His name was Hiei. He was tall with black hair cut so short you could see his scalp.

"We cannot do anything right now. We must return to Konoha and ask Jiraiya of the Sannin for assistance. He is one of the only people who know how to remove foreign suicide tags without triggering them." Kakashi said.

"But what about the mission? We're Konoha ninja! Jeezus, collateral damage is part of the job—"

He didn't get the chance to finish his sentence before Naruto backhanded him into the ground.

"So you would sacrifice innocent lives just to keep a good track record?" Naruto growled. He made to pick up the man and slam him into the ground again but was stopped when Hinata tightened her grip on his hand.

Hiei licked his bloody lip. "Did you see that? He attacked me! He's fucking feral!" He said, elbowing away from the blond.

The Konoha-nin who didn't know Naruto seemed to agree but remained silent. Rock-lee, Ten-ten, Hinata and Kakashi looked on, aloof.

"We are not about to endanger innocent lives unnecessarily," Kakashi said. "This mission is a bust. We will return to Konoha and seek assistance." His tone left no place for argument.

Hiei was helped to his feet by the rest of the Konoha-nin. He glared at Naruto's back for a moment then relented.

When it was over, Naruto and Kakashi would wonder what could have been if they had at least tried.

* * *

They slept in shifts. That night it was Hiei's turn to take first watch. It was into Hiei's second hour on duty when he thought about slitting the Jinchuuriki's throat. It wasn't the first time he had thought about it. In fact, he had been having this specific thought ever since he found out about what really happened to the monster that killed his parents.

He had been only 4 years old, but he remembered that his mother had been a Konoha-nin and his father a medic. He remembered the way the village had burned, the way all the villagers screamed in unison; it had been as if Konoha were a living entity being burned alive. His apartment block had been on the very edge of the village, right next to the outer walls. When the Kyuubi attacked he had a front row seat. He remembered that his father had been rushing to pack a few provision before the retreated to the inner village when the thing took its first steps into Konoha. He had been in his play-pen while his father packed in the kitchen. He remembered laughing at his father rushing around like a headless chicken, packing as much food and formula as he could possibly fit into a wicker basket. He remembered his father turning to him and the panic melting from his face like an ice-cream left in the sun, and him smiling and dropping the basket and taking a step towards him. Then something big and red came down on top of the building and his father vanished in an explosion of dust and debris that rocked what was left of the building. He remembered the sound his father's severed arms had made as they hit the floor. They sounded like slices of bologna hitting the ground.

His mother had been called to the front lines so she would never know that her husband had been crushed along with half of their apartment building. She would never know that her son had been left screaming in his play-pen until the fourth finally saved them.

He sometimes he dreamt that he was at the foot of the great monster, looking into its dreadful eyes, and seeing something hang from the edge of its snarl. There, stuck between fangs the size of swords, was the corpse of his mother.

Hiei thought about how easy it would be for him to sneak into its tent and finish it off, but he would surely be caught and executed if he did. He wanted to kill the Kyuubi, but he wouldn't waste his parent's sacrifice that way. Plus, it wasn't like he wanted the Jinchuuriki to die. He had no problem with the boy. It was the demon he wanted to kill. And since the only way for the demon to die was for the boy to die, there was only one way. He was just collateral damage. And collateral damage was…

"Part of the job." Hiei said to himself.

He set off in the direction of the bandit's village.

* * *

Naruto had a thought that made his blood freeze when he awoke to the sounds of screaming and explosions: _Women, the women were screaming_. Then another came: _Why couldn't he hear the children?_ He was out of his tent and flying towards the noise before he could think of the terrible implications. He later realized that he had already known what was wrong. Children's chakra pathways were much smaller and weaker than that of adults. It would take very little for their pathways to tear under the pressure. Imagine a sheet of tissue paper trying to stem the flow of a gardening hose. Naruto didn't want to. That was why he was running.

* * *

By the time the Konoha-nin had arrived the last child was already dead. In the wake of their deaths were the screaming women. Some were on their knees, some scrambled on the ground amidst pools of blood. One woman clutched a severed arm.

It stank of steaming blood and ozone. Like someone had been struck by lightning and reduced to a puddle of heated blood.

"That's what chakra burns smell like," Kakashi said.

Naruto turned to the rest of his team. The Konoha-nin he didn't know were all ghost-pale and shivering. He could see the pallid tone of Hinata's usually pristine white skin. Lee looked like he was about to be sick. There were tears in the corners of his eyes, bless him. Ten-ten looked on bravely despite the fact that she clearly wanted to be anywhere else. Only Kakashi managed to keep his composure.

"Where's Hiei?" The woman from the Konoha-nin asked. Ai. Maybe that was her name, Ai.

"He was the one on duty last night," Another said. "Maybe he saw what happened."

"Or maybe _he_ was what happened," Naruto growled.

All their faces turned to the blond. Hinata caught on first.

"You don't think that—," she began to say. Then she saw his face and knew that was exactly what he thought.

The rest of them quickly realized Naruto's implication.

"He would never do that!" Ai protested. Several smaller nods of agreement passed through her cohorts.

"Well he was the one who wanted to attack despite the risks," Kakashi said, for once not daring to pull out his little orange book. "Collateral damage is part of the job."

"And the fact that he isn't here only gives credence to Naruto's theory." Hinata said. "Let me check." The veins around her eyes bulged grotesquely. With her Byakugan active her vision became telescopic x-ray, allowing her to see inside someone's body from over ten kilometers away.

"He's here. Near the far end of the village."

"What about the bandits? Where are they?" Ten-ten asked, fingering a kunai.

Hinata did another scan. "Dead. But one or two are missing. I think they escaped."

"Nearly 50 dead before someone could activate those seals," Kakashi said. "It's a crying shame."

"Why?" Ai asked.

Kakashi pointed to the Naruto, who was fast becoming a dot in the distance.

"He's going to kill him," Ten-ten said plainly.

Hinata nodded grimly. Kakashi was surprised that she didn't try to stop him. She had just accepted it. It was Naruto, he decided. Since they had reunited a sort of telepathy had developed between them. They could pick up and understand each other's emotions without the need for physical cues. Hinata had understood the way Naruto felt when he saw what had happened, and maybe why he felt responsible.

"We should go after him," Ai said.

"Should we?"

The Konoha-nin were shocked. They had never thought that Rock-lee would be acquiescent to murder, especially that of a fellow Konoha-nin.

"How can you say that, Lee?" Tenten asked.

He threw one arm out and swept out in an arc it in front of him. "Look at this, Tenten. Is the man who would willingly risk this worth any sort of mercy?"

She couldn't answer him. Instead she began to walk in the direction Naruto had fled in. Slowly.

* * *

Hiei was on his knees and caked in dirt and blood. He had done it. Despite his team's cowardice, he had completed the mission. Yes, one had gotten away, but that small-fry wasn't worth the trouble. Plus, he was tired.

He never saw Naruto's knee colliding with his chin. He would have been sent flying if another Naruto hadn't appeared behind him, pinning his arms behind his back.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?!" He cried just before Naruto's fist rocked his jaw with a sound like someone whacking a bale of hay. When Naruto pulled his hand back he saw blood dripping from the corner of Hiei's mouth. He threw his left out and scored a cut under Hiei's left eye; his right came back around and split his lip; another right landed square on Hiei's nose, the crunching noise as it broke made him smile. This continued on for some time.

When Naruto finished both of Hiei's eyes were swollen shut. His nose was crushed flat against his face. Lips the size of Vienna sausages blew blood bubbles from the corners of his mouth.

Naruto flexed his bloodied hands together. His knuckles popped satisfactorily.

"You're probably wondering why I didn't let you explain," Naruto said, speaking as much to himself as he was to his victim. "It's simple. I don't care. I don't care why you did it. I don't care if it was because you wanted to prove you were better than me, or if you thought you could do it without being detected. All I care about is that there are a lot of dead children back in that village. And I think their mothers have something to say to you."

The clone behind Hiei lifted him to his feet and began to drag him towards the wailing.

By the time they got back the crying had lowered to desolate crooning. It was the sound of women comforting their children. It made Naruto's heart ache.

They dodged congealing puddles of blood until they met the rest of the Konoha-nin. When they saw the result of Naruto's beating, most were relieved; he hadn't killed him. Ai was horrified.

"What the hell did you do to him?" She demanded.

"Nothing compared to what's about to happen." Naruto replied. The way he said it made their spines shiver.

Naruto turned and kicked Hiei onto his back. He then planted on foot on the man's chest and shouted: "This man killed your children!"

The wailing stopped. In its place came the sound of feet shuffling through dirt, and the familiar scraping noise of metal being dragged through dirt. The scraping grew louder, the shuffling going from a single set of feet into a chorus of movement. Hiei struggled when he heard the dragging noise but Naruto held him steady.

The women moved so slowly that it seemed as if they were fading into existence around them. Most were splattered with blood that dripped from their clothes and hands. Their faces were blank canvasses. All of them were carrying something sharp. Ten-ten had to pull out a kunai in order to feel safe.

 _Their eyes._ She thought. _There's nothing in them._

They surrounded the Konoha-nin.

"We are ninja sent from Konoha to kill the bandits that held you hostage."

The woman who had been cradling a severed arm spoke. Her voice was the absolute voice of death.

"They didn't hold us hostage. Only our children, only my boy."

"We knew what was going on. I saw the seal on the back of a little girl's neck," Naruto said.

This stirred them. Kakashi noted the small clinking sounds of their grips tightening on their weapons.

"It was you." The woman said. She had a meat cleaver in one hand. Her son's arm was in the other.

Naruto closed his eyes as if he had been struck. "No. I knew what the seals would do. We were planning to come back with someone who could take them off."

They didn't respond. Rock-lee looked around nervously. There was no way they could avoid killing the mothers if it came to a fight.

"Then…why?" The lines on her face began to deepen into valleys and crevasses of rage.

"This piece of shit," Naruto said, emphasizing the word 'shit' with a kick to Hiei's ribs, "disobeyed a direct order. He decided that your children's lives were worth the risk.

One woman cried out.

"He said they were collateral damage," Naruto said.

Another cry sounded, followed by the raising of weapons.

Naruto took his foot of Hiei's chest and turned. There was a tense moment when the Konoha-nin thought the mothers would attack them, but that passed when the crowd split.

Naruto nodded at them. "Let's go."

His friends began to follow him; the rest of the Konoha-nin seemed at odds with Hiei's fate however.

"Are we really just going to leave him? They'll kill him." Ai protested.

Kakashi stepped in. "Hiei disobeyed a direct order from his superior and endangered the lives of this team. He is responsible for the deaths of more than two dozen children. Is that someone you would want watching your back?"

Ai had no answer. Instead she began to follow Naruto.

* * *

Hiei moaned through his swollen lips. Little blood bubbles popped from the corners of his mouth. His eyes were swollen shut, so he couldn't see the mother's faces as they approached. He would have screamed if he could.

At first there were hands clutching at him; little, calloused hands that gripped his clothes and hair and pulled. He screamed as a chunk of hair was ripped clean from his scalp, spitting blood from his cut tongue. He tried to fight but he was exhausted from his earlier endeavor. He kept screaming until one of the women took hold of his tongue and cut it out with a rusty kitchen knife. It was then that the mothers began to use the various instruments they had collected from their homes. They had hatchets and knives and hammers and axes, and they used them.

When they finished only his teeth were remained.

* * *

The trip back to Konoha was silent. This time they used two person shifts. The Konoha-nin Naruto didn't know began to sleep on the opposite side of the campfire. He could hear their whispers at night when they thought he asleep. They blamed him for Hiei's actions.

"If we had attacked together then we could have killed them before they could activate the seals," was one of their theories. This didn't hurt so much. They were ignorant, and ignoring those kinds of people had been part of his upbringing.

What they didn't realize was that suicide seals were ticking time bombs. A single spike of chakra or a single tampering touch would set them off. Even worse, an undirected surge of chakra, like the kind that comes from a surge of intense emotions, could trigger them too.

Then there was the fact that the seals couldn't be drawn on by just anyone. It would take someone trained in fuuinjutsu to be able to draw the seal. Among the bandits that escaped must have been a former ninja, and one with enough experience and skill to draw over two dozen suicide seals without fucking one up and killing himself. Even if they had attacked all of the bandits at once, the former-nin would have been able to activate the seals before they could stop them. It was a lose/lose situation.

Then A, would tell them that it was Naruto (she referred to him as the jinchuuriki) who had caused Hiei's lapse in judgement.

"Hiei saw his mom and dad killed by the Kyuubi," she said. "You remember when he attacked Hiei? I think he saw something we didn't. Maybe the beast is coming loose?"

That hurt. Even saving the village couldn't make them see that everything Naruto did was for the benefit of Konoha. Even now they couldn't see past the fox in his stomach.

But what hurt the most came during his sleep.

He dreamed of the children. He remembered their pale faces and their trembling hands. The way they played in order to forget their terror. And worst of all, he understood their fear better than anyone else ever would. It hadn't been more than a handful of years since he was in their position; terrified and powerless. At night, he dreamed of the children. He dreamed he was one of them.

That was how he ended up in The Burning Leaf.

They had debriefed Tsunade, and barring an investigation, it seemed that Naruto would get away scratch-free. But when she kept him behind he knew he was going to get an earful.

Tsunade hadn't shouted, although he would have preferred it. She asked him if he was okay. When he answered yes she called him a liar. He had laughed then. Was it that obvious?

"If I hadn't been on that mission, if it had been Neji or even Sasuke who had given the order, maybe things would have turned out differently," he confessed.

Tsunade had pegged a paperweight at his head.

"Don't you start with that bullshit!" she said. "You know as well as I do that there is nothing you could have done different."

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe if we did something, if we tried but…"

"But what, Naruto?"

The blond looked like he was about to confess that he was still afraid of the dark.

"But…I was scared," he said.

Tsunade's heart stopped. She had thought that there were no more surprises for her, yet it seemed that life wasn't done making a fool out of her. Uzumaki Naruto confessing that he had been afraid? She glanced out her window to make sure the sky wasn't falling.

"I was scared. I saw those kids, saw their terror, and I was scared. Scared I might fail. Scared out of my mind," Naruto said dryly. He swallowed once and felt the back of his throat click. "Scared because I was one of them."

Tsunade kept quiet. She never heard Naruto mention anything about his childhood. But from the size of his medical file, she had an idea of what he went through.

"I looked at them and I saw myself. It's been a long time since I've ever had to think about it. I caught them playing in a park. And I knew they were faking. Because I had been faking. Imagine if there was another war, Baa-chan. Imagine having to do what the Third did, sending children to their deaths. Can you imagine the horror you would feel?"

She shook her head. She had been their best medic during the war, and she had held the hands of many dying children, but the thought of being the one who sent them to their deaths? She didn't even want to pretend she knew what that would feel like.

"After I found out I went back to the group and told them. We decided get rid of the seals before we did anything else. Then that bastard…" He flexed his hands at the thought of Hiei's face. "He said they were collateral damage, and I lost it. I was on him before any of the others could stop me. All I could think was _collateral damage_. Was that what I had been? Raiya told me that Jinchuuriki means "The power of human sacrifice." That was what I was, a sacrifice. And if it meant that I would suffer for the rest of my life, that was just _collateral damage_."

The Fifth did her best not to flinch and failed. She tried to say something, but her tongue had turned to lead in her mouth.

"I sometimes dream about them. In these dreams I'm one of them, and I see myself approaching from the forest. All I see is death." Naruto's voice began to crack under the strain of his guilt. "And sometimes I see their last moments. I feel their pain, that awful, terrible pain that comes just before their bodies explode. And I know they were thinking of me. I was the death that came to their village. I was why they suffered."

His voice went quiet. For a moment, Tsunade thought: _"He looks like someone who can't stand to be in his own skin any longer. Like someone who has witnessed one too many horrible things and is on the verge of just letting everything go."_

She couldn't say anything. Tsunade had been pampered and spoiled when she was a child, and although she had been in a war, her grandfather had prepared her for it.

Naruto was not her. He had never had any help. She had no way of connecting with that part of him. She was his last goddamn living relative, and she couldn't comfort him. She felt useless.

Naruto stayed silent with his shoulders shaking like the leaves of a disturbed pine. He knew it was cruel to lay all this at her feet, but he couldn't help it. The dam holding back his sorrow had broken. He was powerless to stop it.

Tsunade wracked her brains for an idea. Therapy? A remedial? A fucking tissue to soak up his tears? For once she had no idea what to do. _Come on, you fucking cow! Think of something!_

What Naruto needed to know was that he wasn't alone in his sorrow. He needed someone who could relate to how he was feeling, to what he had seen. But there was no one from his generation, or even hers, who could. Then another thought came: _"Maybe I should just ask if he wants to retire. Kami knows he deserves a fucking break."_

The word _retire_ sparked her interest. He needed someone who had been just as unprepared for the world as he had been. He needed a veteran.

"I can't tell you I know what you're going through," Tsunade said.

She almost cursed when she saw the look of despair on his face.

"Let me finish, brat! I can't do anything for you. But I know someone who can."

Tsunade scribbled an address on the back of one of the reports on her desk. Then she stepped forward to give it to Naruto.

"Go to the address on here. They can help you."

When Naruto reached for the piece of paper she pulled him into a hug.

"I'm sorry, Naruto. I'm so sorry."

What does the old adage say about first times? Yeah. That was the first time she had ever heard Naruto cry.

* * *

 **The Burning Leaf did its business in one of the reconstructed buildings cloistered in the Red Light District. When the village had been destroyed by Pain, the first thing the survivors did was rebuild as many structures as possible. It would have taken years, but thanks to Konoha-nin's skill with Earth Ninjutsu, the construction was almost complete. The Burning Leaf had been rebuilt by its owners the day after Pain's attack.**

When you walked you were greeted with a scene out of an old western movie. There was a bar top on the right with a balding barman manning his post. Behind the barman was an assortment of sake from across the five nations arranged in huge white bottles, each labeled in a different color depending on where they came from.

To the left were a number of chairs and small, round tables. It stank of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. Under that particular stench, however, was an even older one, the smell of rot and dust and death. It smelled like a crypt. This was a place where people went to mourn, or to die.

There was no working electricity in Konoha at the moment, so they used oil lanterns instead. They offered just enough light for him to know which way he was going, but not enough to illuminate the patron's faces. He could only see their eyes.

Naruto walked to the bar. When he took a seat he noticed that the barman wasn't a man at all. She was an old woman. She was dressed in workman's clothes and a dirty apron that had once been white, but after years of use was now a dull grey like corrugated steel. Her head had been shaved but there was a mat steel-grey hair covering her pate. Her face was deeply lined. Green eyes stared from behind a sinister nose.

The thing that really struck him, however, was the large pitted area of her face. The skin just under her right eye and going down past her jaw was covered in albino burn scars.

The barwoman caught him staring and cracked a wry smile.

"See something you like, stranger?" she asked. Her voice was dry with age, but still feminine.

Naruto, who had years of experience being around stunning women, replied in kind: "Yeah. That Snow Country frosted sake behind you."

The barwoman burst out in great guffaws of laughter that devolved into violent coughing. When Naruto stood up to help her, the barwoman held up one hand, lifted her apron with the other, and then coughed into it. Her last cough ended in retching that sounded like her lung was escaping through her mouth. She wiped her mouth with her apron when the coughing stopped then wiped her hand on the apron as well. Naruto tried not to stare at the large splatter of blood in the middle of the cough stain.

"Sorry about that, stranger," she croaked. "That's what I get for trying to be cute." She smiled. Her teeth were stained bright red.

Naruto tried not to stare, and replied: "Sorry for staring."

The barwoman said: "Not a problem, stranger." Then he saw a glimmer of something in her eyes. "Makes for a great story, don'tcha think?"

That was how he met Ilya.

* * *

Naruto looked at his own burned face and muttered: "Makes for a good story, don'tcha think?"

 _Yeah. A hell of a story. Too bad nobody would believe you._

The left side of his face was black and pitted. His upper lip on that side had been burned away, leaving his mouth in a constant snarl. He had no left eyelid, and his left eye was milky white. The burn scars continued down into the left hemisphere of his torso, and ended just above his pelvis.

 _It looks like Kami was drawing your face, didn't like how he did the left side, and erased it. Only he didn't do a very good job._

Makes for a good story, don'tcha think?

That seemed to break his shock, and he began to chuckle. It was kind of funny. Here he was, in a body that wasn't his and with a face he didn't recognize, and all he could think of was that old lady. What would Ilya have said in this situation?

A little voice that had remained silent since that old lady's unfortunate death sprang up from under the floorboards of his mind:

 _"Don't you dare start crying, you Pansy! You can get angry; you can laugh; you could even have a fucking panic attack for all I care! But don't you dare start crying. It won't do you any good and I don't feel like kicking your sniveling ass right now."_

Naruto took the voice's advice to heart. Naruto howled with laughter that bordered on the hysterical, only without his voice it sounded like a dog trying to bark with its throat torn out. He laughed because he knew if he didn't he would begin to scream, and that would cause all sorts of trouble if someone came to investigate. Naruto stopped when the ragged pathways of his tubes caught fire and tasted the blood welling up in his throat. He grimaced then spat into the sink.

 _"Good. So now that we're finished with the pity party, let's go see what else is new."_

Taking one more glance in the mirror (and feeling the sides of his mouth begin to tug), Naruto left the bathroom.

* * *

Now that he no longer had those itchy bandages all over his face, Naruto took proper stock of his room. The paper was stuck to the floor and walls and ceiling, all of them covered in symbols most ninja wouldn't be able to understand without years of fuuinjutsu experience. How he had gotten the seals on the ceiling without a chair was beyond him.

He bent over and began to rifle through the strewn notes, hoping to find some sort of clue to his situation. It didn't take long for him to find what he was looking for. Here was a piece of a seal he had come to know so well he could pick it out while blindfolded. It was the Hiraishin.

Or rather, it was part of the Hiraishin, just a fraction of the original seal but enough for him to recognize it. There was a single symbol on it, the kanji for the word " _being."_ Naruto frowned. That wasn't right. The proper kanji used in this particular area was _"body"_. He grabbed another. Again, it was clearly part of the Hiraishin, but the kanji was wrong. The next two, three, four pieces all sang the same song. Naruto snorted in distaste. Seeing someone blatantly copy his father's work then simply add his own kanji was like listening to someone singing a popular song with made up lyrics. It was just wrong.

Naruto discarded his latest retrieval with disgust then decided he needed some fresh air. He moved to the door. When he grabbed hold of the doorknob he felt that tell-tale tingle of his chakra being siphoned. Normally he would have immediately removed his hand but he had recognized the seal that was currently at work. It seemed that the bastardized Hiraishin wasn't the only seal in this room.

Whoever had been here before hadn't only plagiarized the Fourth's work. There was a privacy seal over the room, the kind that was used in the Hokage's personal office.

When activated, a privacy seal created a sort of chakra bubble that would encompass the entire room it occupied. This chakra bubble would then shield its occupants from the outside, blocking sound, sight, smell and even chakra. Anko described it to him.

 _"You've never waited outside one so you don't know, but when you're in there I can't see you. I can't hear you or smell you or even feel you anymore. I have to stand there and wait, completely helpless to do anything if something goes wrong. And then you walk out like nothing's happened while I've been in hell, and I want to wrap my arms around you and make sure you're okay. Then I want to strangle you until your eyes pop out of your skull because you had me so fucking worried over nothing at all!"_

Thinking of Anko made Naruto's heart hurt slightly. She had been one of his most staunch companions during their time together, and they had been inseparable during the war. Their parting had been one of the worst moments of his previous life.

Naruto shook his head free of the old memories and tried to focus on the present. He needed to find out where he was, and more importantly, when.

* * *

Naruto exited into a long corridor with beige walls, dark save for the light coming from the other end. He placed a hand on the wall opposite his room and walked until he came to a pair of closed doors. He thought about ignoring them, but he couldn't help the way his stomach tingled at the thought of new discovery. Naruto gently opened the door on his left.

Thanks the faint flowery scent, Naruto easily identified the room as a girl's despite the Spartan décor. Besides the smell, however, there wasn't much to identify the owner as male or female. There was a bed with white sheets, a desk with a lamp, a closet and a dresser. The desk itself was bare save for a few framed photos and the lamp. It was a room that looked like it wasn't much lived in.

Naruto took a moment to look at the photos. There were three, and his gaze was drawn to the biggest one. It was a photo of four people standing in front of a field of grass. Three were children, and they stood in front of the adult. Two boys and a girl. The girl was in the middle and she had both her arms around the boy's necks. She was smiling broadly.

Naruto had to swallow his spit when he saw her. She was the spitting image of the Fourth, even more so than he had been. Sharpen the jaw a little, lengthen the nose, and you would have the Yellow Flash himself.

The two boys looked slightly irked by their sister's grasp on them, but they smiled nonetheless. Naruto was one of the boys. The other looked more like their mother than their father, save for two pale blue eyes like faded sapphires. He had red hair that hung to his shoulders. A dimple peaked out from the left corner of his mouth. Naruto stifled a chuckle. They looked exactly like he and Sasuke had in their team photo.

Then his eyes drifted to the adult in the picture.

His intestines went cold.

She was a woman with red hair and violet eyes. She had the same face he had when he was a child, only her skin was pale instead of tan. There were key differences from how he remembered her but those were more to do with age rather than physical change. The only difference he could see was the beginnings of smile lines formed at the corners of her mouth.

His mother was alive.

* * *

Naruto reluctantly withdrew from the room. He wanted to study the picture more, but now an even more ravenous desire was building inside him. His mother was alive, and that was enough to override any sort of protocol. A longing had suddenly awoken within him, one he hadn't been able to identify it until Ilya had spelled it for him.

* * *

He had been having another bad day. This one was initiated when Tsunade had finally let him have his inheritance. Most of it was intangible— money in the form of bank bonds, property, titles, etc— but then she had presented a box to him. Inside was something that had broken his heart.

It was a red scarf.

Tsunade explained that his mother had knitted it for him while she was pregnant. He had known that his parents had loved him, but that red scarf had been the first proof of how much they had been looking forward to being parents. It struck him like a kunai in the gut.

He would never have a mother, would never know what it would be like to be held in the arms of someone who loved you more than life itself. He would never know what it was like to be pushed on a swing. Or what it felt like to be told a bedtime story.

And that hurt.

He fled.

He wound up in the Burning Leaf and began to drink. It was several hours later, with him only slightly tipsy (one of the benefits of being a jinchuuriki), when Ilya finally arrived to take the nightshift.

She hadn't even glanced at what he was staring at before she knew something was wrong. To her credit, she didn't immediately ask him what was wrong. She knew him too well to try and yank the information out of him. Instead she told him another story from her childhood.

* * *

 _"I once got a new yukata for my birthday."_

 _Naruto looked up, confused._

 _"But you know that yukatas only get worn on special occasions. No one except princesses who think they shit gold wear yukatas every day. But this one was special. It was pink and covered with white petals. Even I could tell that my parents had spent a good bit of cash on it. I was in love with it from the moment it came out of the box."_

 _She stopped her story to make sure that her audience was listening. Naruto leaned forward on the bar stool, whatever had been staring at forgotten in his lap. She smiled._

 _"Well, I wanted to wear it to the academy one day. And my parents said no." Her smile turned melancholy._

 _"So, I sneaked it out in my backpack and put it on in the academy bathroom. The kids, of course, thought I looked stupid. You remember how I told you I was infamous for my temper back then?"_

 _Naruto nodded._

 _"Well, I got angry, and during lunchtime I tried chasing them down."_

 _"Bad idea," Naruto said._

 _Ilya chuckled. "Yes, very bad idea. I tripped and it tore all the way up to my hip on the left side, ruining it. All the kids laughed."_

 _Here righteous anger flickered in Naruto's eyes. "Did you get 'em?"_

 _"I did. The tear allowed me to chase them down. I trounced them hard." Ilya said. "Then I went to the bathroom and cried my eyes out."_

 _"Did you tell your parents?"_

 _"Are you stupid?" Ilya asked him good-naturedly. "Of course I didn't. I went home and put it back in the box and kept it there for the rest of my life."_

 _Naruto frowned. "Didn't they find out?"_

 _"Yes. But I didn't know that until much later. I always thought I was so smart for pulling one over on them, but later I found out that they had known since I came home that day." Ilya smiled sadly. "I always wondered why they never mentioned it. And eventually I figured it out."_

 _"What was it?"_

 _"It was love. They loved me, and while the yukata had been expensive, it hadn't been important to them, not as important as me at least. They knew I would disobey them. They knew I would tear it. And yet they still bought it for me. You see, things don't matter. They're just things. What matters is love."_

 _Naruto's expression wavered. He glanced down at the red scarf in his lap. "But all I have is things. Things to remind me of everything I missed."_

 _Then Ilya laid out his problem in a single sentence. "You know what you're problem is, Love?"_

 _Naruto looked up._

 _"Your inner-child is starving."_

 _"What do you mean?"_

 _"I mean," she said, pouring him a fresh cup of sake, "that you didn't have much of a childhood. So you never really got a chance to be a kid. You were kicked out of the orphanage, and from four years old you had to learn to fight for yourself. And that sort of thing hobbles a person."_

 _"But I'm a ninja. I don't have time to be a kid." Naruto replied lamely._

 _"That's shit and you know it. Look at any of the Jonin you know. You think Kakashi reads those books 'cause he's horny all the time? Or that Guy runs around preaching about youth and wearing that green mess because he's genuinely that weird? Or that Anko you keep mentioning— you think she dresses that way because she's a slut?"_

 _Anger flashed across Naruto's face. "Hey. Don't you dare—"_

 _"You know what I mean," she said, dismissing him with a wave. "What I'm saying is that those little weird things they do is how they play. Kakashi knows it annoys the shit out of people when he reads his porn in public. Guy knows he weirds people out, he even brought his little Genin in on the joke. Even Anko does it. She dresses that way to mess with everyone who thought they could ignore her in the past. Now she's hot as shit, and everyone who isn't a fucking monk wants a piece. They're all playing the same game: satisfying their inner child. Your problem is that you never really had the chance to be a kid. Your inner child is starving, and that's what's fucking you up whenever you think about your parents."_

 _Naruto took another peek at his lap. "So what am I supposed to do?"_

 _"When was the last time you did something you enjoyed? And I'm not talking about training, or missions, or anything to do with another person, I'm talking about you. When you were a kid, what did you enjoy doing? What made you happy?"_

 _Naruto was about to answer when Ilya cut him off again. "And don't you dare say pranks. We both know that they were revenge on the people who messed with you."A smile cracked through her grim expression. "No matter how funny they were."_

 _Ilya served a drink to another customer. When she returned Naruto had emptied his cup. His face was pale, and he looked very much like a man about to admit a heinous secret. Then he went bright red. She poured him another drink and he swallowed it automatically. He took a deep breath._

 _"I use to tell myself stories," Naruto said, "about my parents."_

 _The silence that followed stung him. Stupid, stupid! Why didn't he lie?_

 _When he finally dared to look at her, Ilya was already half-way over the bar top. She was bent over, her stomach flat against the bar top. She grabbed his hand and dragged it onto the bar top. When she was standing again, she said: "Tell me one."_

 _That had been the moment they had become friends._

* * *

Naruto pressed his forehead against the closed door and forced his heartbeat to slow. When it settled under a staccato Naruto turned. The door before him swelled until it looked like it would swallow him whole. Butterflies caressed the bottom of his stomach. His grabbed the knob. His hand slipped. He clenched his fists and felt the sweat on his palms. He dried them on his clothes and opened the door.

There were clothes everywhere. It smelled like dirty socks and that secret shame boys discover when they're old enough. It was furnished just like the girl's room, except this one was covered in posters of old movies and celebrities. One wall had a bull's-eye and several kunai sticking out of it. The owner of the room was laying face up on his bed, snoring. That same red hair that adorned their mother was now sticking out haphazard from his head.

Naruto had to smile despite his disappointment. Already he felt small affection blossoming for the boy. He looked so much like how Naruto imagined Kushina looked when she was a child. He closed the door quietly.

Naruto continued down the hall until he came to another set of doors. Once again his pulse drummed in his ears. He rubbed his palms dry on his clothes again and tried the door on the right. It was a bathroom decked with white tiles.

He turned to the final door and opened it.

It led into what looked like the master bedroom. There was a queen size bed with an armoire, closet, dresser and even an oval vanity mirror. There were several pots and perfume bottles on the dresser. The room's walls were dark auburn and the bed sheets matched them. He had no doubt that he would find red clothes in her closet. His mother had always looked so beautiful in red.

But it was the smell that got to him. It smelled like sweat and soap and some flower he couldn't recognize. It smelled like how he imagined mothers were supposed to smell.

Naruto contented himself with several deep breaths while disappointment anchored itself in his heart. The room was empty.

* * *

The corridor ended in a large foyer that doubled as a kitchen. The kitchen area was on the far side of the room opposite the front door. Closest to the corridor was a living room with several chairs and a large couch.

The foyer was empty. A cursory glance at the kitchen helped him spot a large clock above fridge. It was 4:17 AM. Were his sister and his mother out on a mission? No. His sister was the same age as he physically was. She was probably still in the academy with him and his brother.

His mother might be out on a mission. The thought made his heart sink into his stomach. Waiting for her to return from a dangerous mission after a lifetime of separation wasn't particularly high on his to-do list.

A note on the counter alleviated his fears. It was written in short, curt handwriting; the kind that you learn after filling out lots of paperwork. It said:

"Have gone training with Aiko. Be back by six. Love, Mom."

It was signed with a few X's and O's.

Now the old fire was lit again. His mother was out there, training with his sister. She was alive. She had left him hugs and kisses! He had to find her!

This time Naruto caught himself from just rushing outside. He couldn't just sneak out and go find her. He needed a plan.

Naruto took several meditative breaths, and forced himself to go back to his room.

* * *

Naruto stepped out onto the 9th floor of his apartment block dressed in white clothes that strangely resembled hospital robes. It seemed that his family stayed on the west side of the village, near the business district. Their apartment block faced eastwards, allowing them to receive the first rays of the sun. It was still too early for any real sunshine however, but he could see the dark sky being pushed back by the pink and purple tendrils of dawn light rising over the horizon.

Naruto closed his eyes. During the war he was forced to learn how to sense chakra after a particularly disastrous mission involving a trio of Genjutsu users. He had spent almost three days sifting through their illusions before he lost his patience and bombed the entire area into oblivion.

His face still burned whenever he remembered how he had to explain to Baa-chan why he had been missing for three days. She had called up Sakura and, surprisingly, Choji to teach him chakra sensory techniques.

It had been tough and involved weeks' worth of training in not only chakra sensory techniques but also advanced chakra control. There was a time when he had to balance boulders on his fingertips while hanging upside down; or when he had to learn how to waltz on the surface of a turbulent lake; or Sakura's survival training. He shuddered when he remembered those fucking red balls.

The trick was to treat chakra sensing as you would any other sense. To truly use it you had to ignore the other. In Naruto's case, he had to shut down his other senses via blocking their corresponding tenketsu. This allowed him to pinpoint chakra signatures even in densely populated areas, but also left him completely open to attack.

It didn't take long for Naruto to find his family. He just looked for the most powerful chakra signatures in the area, and found two flaring somewhere in the Area 44. He instantly recognized the larger one. He had only felt something like it once before.

Naruto shook his legs. This would be the first real test of his physical capabilities in his new body, and he knew how disastrous cramps could be during ninja leaping. He sent his chakra down to the soles of his feet and felt it thrum warmly through his legs. When he felt that he had enough, NAruto leapt off the 9th floor balcony, diving towards Area 44.

* * *

Uzumaki Kushina caught the kunai flying for her throat then flicked it back, nicking her assailant on the shoulder. Her opponent cursed and flipped back into the brush.

"C'mon, Aiko. Don't waste my time with this boring shit. Gimme' something spicy!" The red-haired woman said. She was dressed in a black kunoichi stealth uniform. She wore no kunai pouch or headband. Her hair was tugged into a ponytail and fastened with ninja wire. She was completely relaxed.

Kushina was in the middle of training Aiko, her only daughter (and secret favourite among her three children, although she would rather die than admit that.) Aiko herself was almost the spitting image of her father, down to the shape of her eyes and the blond hair. She had even Naruto beaten in terms of paternal likeness.

Kushina didn't allow herself to wince at the thought of her oldest, but did feel guilty at the bolt of grief that shot down her spine whenever she thought of him.

Shame.

Shame so fierce that she had to force herself to look at him sometimes. She knew it wasn't his fault that he bore the scars of her mistakes, but it still…

Two hands reached up from under the ground and grabbed her ankles. Before she could react, Kushina had been buried up to her neck in the earth.

A girl dressed like her rose from the ground like a fish rising out of water.

"Is that spicy enough for you?" Aiko asked smugly.

Kushina had to banish the image of her late husband's face from her mind before she could reply.

"Good enough," she conceded. Then she began to dig her way out of the ground, her powerful muscles bulging as she first tore her arms free of the earth then hoisted herself out of the hole.

"You have to show me how to do that," Aiko said, folding her arms.

Kushina smiled. Then she flexed one arm. Her sleeve barely contained her bulging bicep.

"You were thinking about Naruto, weren't you?" Aiko asked.

Once again she was struck by how similar her only daughter and her dead husband were. They both had the undeniable—and frankly scary—ability to know exactly what she was thinking.

One hand reached behind her head and scratched that itch that always came when Kushina admitted something that embarrassed her. "Yeah, I was." Then the smile faded from her face and she stopped scratching.

Aiko fixed her gaze on her mother. "How many times do we have to go through this? You can't keep blaming yourself for what happened—"

"—I know that!" Kushina snapped, the grief and guilt still writhing under her skin. "But I'm your mother! I was supposed to protect you, and I failed!"

Aiko didn't flinch. "And what could you have done different? You didn't start that fire. You weren't the reason Naruto was in the library that night. Nothing you could have done would have made a difference. We don't blame you."

Kushina barked out in laughter that sounded like she had a throat full of crushed gravel.

"You may not blame me, but Naruto does."

This seemed to get under Aiko's skin slightly because she didn't reply.

"You can't see, maybe because you don't want to, but I'm his mother. I know my son even better than he knows himself. He barely looks at me anymore. He doesn't go outside, he doesn't go to school, he barely comes to dinner anymore! He hates me, Aiko. My little boy hates me!"

Kushina's rant came out in a single long breath. She hung her head, ashamed that she had let her emotions get the better of her. Aiko remained respectfully silent. She should have known better than to bring up Naruto. She just couldn't stand the way her family seemed to be coming apart. They had been so happy once. And it saddened her to admit that that happiness seemed like it had been a long, long time ago.

The two had fallen into an uneasy silence when they both felt a familiar chakra signal approaching from the direction of the village. The Uzumaki women shared a look that sent the same psychic message between them, the kind that can only be shared between women of the same blood: "Naruto."

* * *

Naruto arrived at a large open field bordered by a huge, dark forest. It was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. There was a sign on the fence. It read:

"All who enter beware: DEATH INSIDE!"

Naruto chuckled. Anko had written it when a few Genin entered on a dare. They had gone missing for a week and were then pronounced dead when Anko found a shin bone in a giant pile of tiger shit. Not giant because it had been a large amount, but because it was shit by a giant tiger. All the wildlife in the Forest of Death grew to exaggerated size for some reason. The tigers, the wolves, the bears, the spiders—even the leaches grew to the size of small dogs.

Naruto shook his legs. They were slightly numb from the exertion. This body was obviously not used to physical exertion. To be tired after such a short distance—it was embarrassing.

He was contemplating how to proceed when two figures emerged from the forest. They were dressed in black shinobi uniforms, the kind that shinobi wore on stealth mission, or when him and his wife roleplayed as the helpless prince and the kunoichi.

The first thing he noticed, besides their clothes, was the stark difference in their hair. One had shoulder-length hair that was obviously blond but looked golden in the dim light. The other took his breath away.

She had red hair that looked almost crimson in the dark. It was tied back in a ponytail. She was taller than her companion but only slightly heavier, and almost perfectly proportioned. But it was her face that stole the show. He had often studied her portrait that hung in the Namikaze compound, but nothing would replace the way she looked in real life. Her face was heart-shaped with a small nose and generous mouth. Her eyes were violet and glowed in the dark.

He resisted the urge to run to her, but he couldn't stop trembling. She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Naruto almost let himself go, then remembered the breathing he had learned from Ilya. One breathe in-hold. Breathe out-hold. By the time he was calm the two women were already upon him. He choked on his spit when Kushina stopped right in front of him.

The woman stroked his cheek, looking worried.

"Is something wrong, Naru? Did you have a nightmare again?"

Kushina had offered the question more out of habit than worry. Naruto couldn't speak, and more importantly, didn't want to. He never responded to any of her invitations of comfort.

Imagine her surprise when her son's face, without its bandages and trademark grimace, began to scrunch together under the force of his emotions.

Kushina had spent enough time with her children to recognize the symptoms of a crying fit, yet she couldn't process it. Naruto never cried. He never shouted, or yelled, or wept, or groaned. She remembered the one time he had taken a kunai in the thigh (one of the reasons why Anko wasn't allowed to use weapons in the apartment anymore.) He had simply pulled the kunai from his leg.

But now the emotion was clear on what remained on Naruto's face. Loneliness, sadness, and hopeless longing all fought for dominance on his face. She hugged him out of instinct.

Naruto had been leader of his village for 12 years, had lead dozens of suicide missions, had fought since the day he had been born; yet he had never been so quickly and completely defeated as he had been when his mother held him. He reached around, grasped her like a drowning man grasping drift would, and wept.

* * *

 _ **Author's Note: Please feed me reviews! Anything you don't like, or think I could do better? Tell me about it! If I did it right, tell me about it too!**_

 _ **And as always, thank you for reading!**_


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